Tag Archives: conservatism

A common reason, at least among my self-proclaimed liberal friends, for their supporting Democrats and liberals in government is that they think these political groups expend more effort caring for the poor, the “downtrodden”, the people who have slipped through the cracks of our system and who need help more than you or I.

This is a real issue that affects real people and it is good that we expend time and effort both thinking about the poor, and working to alleviate their condition.

However, the poor are better served by Republican and conservative political ideas than by others, and here’s why:

First, we must agree on what is a suitable goal for the majority of charitable programs and acts. Conservatives consider the best default goal of charity programs to be the alleviation of immediate and extreme need and the readying and encouragement of those poor to re-enter the productive and self-sufficient mainstream as contributing members of society. This is based on the idea that people are more than physical bodies with physical needs, but are also, at the very least, minds with mental needs, and, depending on your metaphysical persuasion, spiritual beings with spiritual needs. Feed the body and you have resolved that need for today, feed the mind and soul with accomplishment and self-sufficiency and you have brought a person out from the true pains of poverty.

The default goal, therefore, of charity should be not simply the repeated alleviation of physical need, but it should contain a restorative function as well, encouraging the people taking advantage of the resources to move on to where they themselves are contributing. There are people who are unable to, in any way, contribute. However, these cases are rare, and we are limiting ourselves to talking about the type of charity that is most beneficial to the majority of people. Suffice to say, there should be programs for those completely unable to enter the mainstream. There are hospitals, homes, services, programs, all designed for these people.

To keep all poor in the permanent underclass of poverty and welfare families is to rob them of crucial aspects of their humanity. Unfortunately, the majority of government charity programs, in being designed ostensibly for the poorest and least fortunate, have been designed to discourage the sorts of behaviors and societal structures that we know are most conducive to producing contributing members of society. That a single mother can receive more assistance if she is not supported by a husband, while well intentioned, has certainly done nothing to encourage stable nuclear families in our poorest neighborhoods. That many programs are offered with little or no accountability or verification or auditing means that the efficacy of the programs is not evaluated and thus programs are not adjusted or changed or scrapped and redone when it is necessary to do so.

Finally, what people want and what people need are sometimes not the same. For people who are making their own way, they are free to do as they please, even by engaging in damaging behaviors, within bounds of reason and the law, without infringing on others freedom to do the same. Smoking, gambling, excessive drinking, eating raw dairy (that’s a joke, raw dairy is illegal but it ought not be), watching Glee, reading the Twilight series, and the like. When people are living on other’s charity, their freedoms in this respect are curtailed at the desire and discretion of those whose charity they are living upon. The government has not right telling people what they can and cannot eat, how they should or should not go about seeking employment, and the like, so long as those people are living their lives within the moral law and paying for all their chosen vices themselves. The government, or the charity, has every right to request people conform to their desired standard of behavior if those people wish to receive from their beneficence. A private charity has greater leeway in this than does government though. A private charity can expect some basic moral living or other requirements of lifestyle, while government needs to limit its requirements to the very basic regarding good use of its funds for the purpose of accountability to those who provided the funds, namely, you and I.

But what’s all this got to do with voting Republican? We’re getting to it, we just had to lay a little groundwork to make sure we’re on the same page and talking about the same thing.

First, conservative policies are generally geared towards greater job creation. We’re not talking about seasonal jobs or jobs with the Census Bureau. A healthy business climate is a climate that grows businesses, and growing businesses hire more people. Sure, some people are hired in Bangalore and some in Peru, but there are also more jobs here, where we live and can work. When there are more jobs and more people are needed to fill those jobs, poor people can get those jobs more easily. Liberal policies are generally geared towards the perception of equality, which is more difficult to pin down, except to say that if you see somebody who has more than you and your first thought is that somebody ought to take that from them, you should just keep voting liberal.

Second, conservative policies regarding charity encourage the restorative function. Recently, President Obama used an executive order to gut many of the requirements of the Welfare to Work program enacted by President Clinton and the Republican Congress lead by Newt Gingrich. By allowing states to not have to try so hard to get people back into the workforce when they are drawing welfare checks and are able-bodied by removing the deadline requirements, the program has been effectively gutted. Now, people on welfare are allowed to remain wallowing in their poverty and welfare-fueled subsistence without the states administering that welfare being requires to verify the recipients are seeking employment or engaging in training. Conservatives support Welfare to Work requirements because they recognize first the need of every human to be productive, both for their mental, emotional, and spiritual health, and for the need for the government charity to be carried out in a effective and efficient manner.

Third, conservative policies regarding care for the poor seek to build up the poor into becoming something besides poor. A primary goal of every conservative person is to see others taking responsibility for their own lives. When everybody is taking responsibility for their own lives, less is required of society, government, and other potentially powerful entities we humans must deal with. A government that less is required of is a government that will have to shrink. And people who are not is need of a strong government are people who are more capable in and of themselves. This is a chicken or the egg sort of point. We conservatives like small government and we recognize a certain sort of general population is required to make that possible, and we like a responsible and self-capable general population and recognize that will result in a necessarily smaller government. Not quite a paradox, but the two are intrinsically linked. So because of this desire for people’s generally greater capability, we want to see the poor growing up out of their poverty, mostly by their own strength, but assisted as necessary by those who are strong themselves. In the same way a butterfly hatching from it’s chrysalis must be left to struggle on it’s own if it is to have any chance of developing the strength necessary to survive, people who have done most of the work necessary to lift themselves beyond where they were and into new horizons of ability are blessed both by the new horizons and by the strength to handle that horizon. This idea of earned capability was championed by the ex-slave Booker T. Washington, who argued, against the darling of social studies W. E. B. DuBois, that the best way to open the roads out of slavery the widest is to remove every hinderance possible, so that it is only the capability of the person themselves that will limit ow far they go. Which brings us to the final point.

Conservatives believe the best sort of government charity is where the government gives, and then gets out of the way. First, the hard part: this getting out of the way means you are giving people the freedom to fail again, to fail completely and totally. The other side of this coin is that without the freedom to fail, you also do not really have the freedom to succeed. Conservatives believe in minimal regulation, only that which is necessary to prevent the most egregious abuses and damage. Conservatives believe in the right to work, which means workers should have freedom to form a union if they please, but are not required to do so in order to gain employment in the field of their choice. Conservatives believe in cutting out corruption at any and all levels, as it unbalances the fields of law, access to services, and business opportunity, and it puts needless restrictions and higher costs on people affected by it. A person who is poor but wishes not to be is better served by a soup kitchen and an open and thriving field of employment than by a Link card and greedy and corrupt politicians in some of the biggest metropolises in American, which, ironically, are run primarily by Democrat-controlled political machines.

“Do you ever feel that you are wasting your breath? Do you think that truth will ever matter? No matter what you prove or disprove, in the end the truth will remain in the shadows of what people want to hear and want to believe.”

I agree more with this thought than I care to. It is the human wish to be told lies that keeps us where we are. A stoic realism lies at the heart of the conservative viewpoint. It is about accepting limits that are absolute, which the human condition places on human hope.

One could define the left as just the opposite: the inability to come to terms with who we are; the obstinate, compulsive, destructive belief in the fantasy of transformation, in the desperate hope of an earthly redemption.

I have watched my friends, whose ideas created an empire of inhumanity, survive the catastrophe of their schemes and go on to unexpected triumph in the ashes of their defeat. Forced to witness the collapse of everything they once had dreamed and worked to achieve, they have emerged unchastened by their illusions to renew their destructive utopian crusades. The society they declared war on has even rewarded them. Today they are the cultural navigators in the nation more responsible for the worldwide collapse of their ideology. I cannot explain this dystopian paradox other than to agree that politics is indeed irrational and socialism a wish as deep as any religious faith. I do not know that the truth must necessarily remain in the shadows. But I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for reason to kill.

And a liar, of the worst kind. Pretentiously hiding behind his squeaky clean image and claiming he’d never talked to Blagojevich about favors that resulted in his appointment to the Senate. Santimoniously sermonizing ad nauseum about how he was about the people’s business and wouldn’t allow sordid speculation sway his resolve.

There’s no sordid speculation here and that sactimonious sermonizing can go right back down the vile gullet it emerged from to add it’s putrid mass to the seething stench that inhabits that man’s soul.

Just a question, an honest one here: knowing the FBI had recorded phone conversations and in all likelihood had him incriminating himself with incontravertible proof, how did Burris walk the halls of Congress with his debonaire smile? Was his conscience eating him at all? Or is his corruption so complete that he’s quelled all better things within him?

Judge Sotomayor has lots of things going for her: Obama likes her, and… Obama thinks she’ll do a good job.

Why?

A significant number of her decisions have been reversed, and of those upheld, her arguments have been faulted by superior judges. This indicates a consistency only in fallacy and not in skilled jurisprudence.

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life

Would a white male judge saying a version of that phrase last any longer than a water drop on a hot iron skillet? Of course not, and for good reason. There’s no place for preference or opinion in the law.

Justice is supposed to be blind.

Sotomayor, in her arrogance and conceit, proudly claims her judgement issued with her eyes of justice wide open and uncovered is best.

It may indeed her best judgement, but it’s not the judgement we require of those occupying the highest chairs of justice in our land.

Yes, the Obama campaign said some months back that the candidate doesn’t seek to re-impose this regulation, which, until Ronald Reagan’s FCC phased it out in the 1980s, required TV and radio broadcasters to give balanced airtime to opposing viewpoints or face steep fines or even loss of license. But most Democrats – including party elders Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Al Gore – strongly support the idea of mandating “fairness.”

Liberals, Rasmussen found, support a Fairness Doctrine by 54 percent to 26 percent, while Republicans and unaffiliated voters were more evenly divided. The language of “fairness” is seductive.

But Obama and the Democrats also plan other, more subtle regulations that would achieve much the same outcome. . . One such measure would be to impose greater “local accountability” on them – requiring stations to carry more local programming whether the public wants it or not. . . The measure is clearly aimed at national syndicators like Clear Channel that offer conservative shows. . .Finally, the Democrats also want more minority-owned stations and plan to intervene in the radio marketplace to ensure that outcome.

It might just be me but does this sound like a direct attack on a multitude of the basic rights that freedoms that are supported and coveted by conservatism. Is this an attack on ideas like say . . . free speech, free market, free enterprise. Wait, I think I just had a revelation . . . Isn’t this a DIRECT attack on freedom.

Honestly, what are the liberal puppeteers trying to accomplish? Isn’t it clear that this is the suppression of dissention, the bridling of local choice, and forceful creation of unsuccessful enterprises in the name of equality (that last quote really sounds like what happened to housing in the United States).

To sum it all up, I know that tomorrow will be better because of what I have done today, but why does today have to be so bleak? I am sorry if this offends some, but I am almost at the point where I cannot look at the presidential candidates without a measure of disdain, distrust, and disturbance.

I like this part of him, and for this reason we conservatives ought to do what we must to quell our gag reflexes and vote McCain into office.

In a speech on his philosophy and standards regarding the Supreme Court of the United States, John McCain specifically referenced Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr, and the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist as epitomes of those he’d choose.

“jurists of the highest caliber who know their own minds, and know the law, and know the difference.”

What a concept: “know their minds, know the law, and know the difference”.

A liberal sees their mind as the law. If man is the chief end of himself, he is his own highest law. If that man is one of authority and power, his mind is the law of those he rules.

Whim and feeling have greater weight than principle and immutable law.

Rush Limbaugh, in a “Pearl of Wisdom” included in his latest Show Notes email explained the how the liberal ideal actual creates dystopia instead of the utopia they desire:

Liberals stand up for principles, but they never stand up for people. People always suffer when liberalism succeeds — and when people are suffering, I don’t think you can shout the warning too loud that it needs to stop.

About 12 elderly Roman Catholic nuns were turned away Tuesday from a polling place because they didn’t have state or federal identification bearing a photograph.

Sister Julie McGuire said she was forced to turn away her fellow members of Saint Mary’s Convent in South Bend, even though they had been told earlier that they would need to get such an ID to vote.

“One came down this morning, and she was 98, and she said, `I don’t want to go do that,'” McGuire said. Some showed up with outdated passports. None of them drive.

Elsewhere across the pivotal state, voting appeared to run smoothly, despite the fears of some elections experts that the photo ID law could cause confusion at the polls.

The money line is at the end of a picture description in the sidebar of the story:

McGuire said most of the nuns were in their 80s or 90s, and the other nuns had spoken with them frequently about the need to get out to a Bureau of Motor Vehicle branch for their free ID.

A practical and normal person led, not by whim and feeling, but by a reasonable balance of justice and mercy would see those old ladies and think “they were warned, others offered to help, there was no fee, they knew better”.

Instead, with the leading title, we are coerced into thinking how mean and ugly those conservative leaders in the Indiana State House who had it out to get these poor old ladies who just wanted their voice to be heard *sob*.

Come on people, do we expect nothing from anybody or anything except the government?

People are capable. People have will and ability. People are free moral agents, with choice and consequence set before them.

The creeping liberal ideology seeks to devalue individuality by removing all force of will from individual people. By passing the place of moral agent from an individual to a group they steal all originality and identity.

And changing the government is not the only answer.

It is more important to work in individual people’s lives, showing them the increased labor of individuality is worth while for the increased liberty it provides.

Samuel Adams put it this way:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

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Without law, there can be no freedom

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I'm a 30-something father, technologist, husband, Christian, musician, and sometimes blogger with a zest for life and a passion for more things than there is time for. I'm married to the woman of my dreams, working in a great job in my favorite career, all while enjoying this wonderful thing we call life.